mark tobey: a northwestern point of view
Mark Tobey is perhaps the best-known member of the Northwest School, an
artistic movement characterized by the use of a subdued color scheme,
a penchant for the mystical, and an Asian influence. The Northwest School
included Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and Guy Anderson. Although Tobey
wasn’t a Northwest native, he loved Seattle—especially Pike
Place Market—and spent countless hours wandering through the Market,
sketchbook in hand.
The young Tobey began his artistic career as a fashion illustrator in Greenwich Village, but in the early 1920s he grew increasingly discontented with the social demands of New York. At the age of 32, he followed a friend to Seattle, where Cornish College of the Arts hired him on commission: He kept 80 cents of the $2 tuition students paid for his art classes. A natural in the classroom, he taught at various institutions for the next three decades, finding teaching the most agreeable way to finance his art.
The Northwest’s gray skies were the perfect backdrop for the muted colors and introspective, spiritual qualities of Tobey’s paintings, which led critics to call him “the Northwest mystic” and “the sage of Seattle.” He received his greatest acclaim when he was in his 60s, but even then he was more lauded in Europe than in his own country. In 1958 he received the international prize for painting at the Venice Biennale, an honor no American had received since James McNeill Whistler in 1895.
In 1960 this great Northwest artist left the Northwest permanently and moved to Switzerland, dismayed by the impact of growth on Seattle. In its post–World War II expansion, Tobey felt, the city had destroyed much of its beauty and erected an offensive sprawl in its place. Although he maintained contact with his Seattle friends and always intended to return, he never did: He died in his home in Switzerland on April 24, 1976, at 85 years of age. Today his paintings can be seen at the Seattle Art Museum, just a few blocks from the Market he loved so well.
